Search This Blog

Thursday, 28 March 2013

This is part of an inspiring blog post by a well-known writer/coach I thought might keep you going!

Endurance Matters

Why we need to learn to toughen up
is this—thick skin is vital for us to keep pressing even when we’re bloody,
wounded or discouraged. Being a career writer isn’t a sprint. It’s a
mega-marathon-mountain-climbing-Iron-Man. Many writers will fail not because of
lack of talent, rather lack of staying power.

Appreciate that Training Often
Involves “Other” Activities

Join a boxing gym and just expect to
do a lot of jumping rope, running, sprinting, bag work, and you’ll get hit with
a medicine ball…a lot.

Yet, at no time during my tenure
“boxing” was I ever attacked by a jump rope or a medicine ball. Those “other
activities” weren’t actual fighting, but they trained fighters for the
endurance necessary to win in the ring.

Winning is frequently tied to
staying power. Writing is no exception. Your mind, fingers and muse strengthen
with focus, time, training and pain.

We’ll do a lot of things (I.e.
blogging) that might not directly have anything to do with writing fiction…but
it trains us to 1) meet self-imposed
deadlines 2) build an audience with our writing voice 3) hook early 4) ENDURE.

I blogged for almost two years
before I passed 50 hits a day. I blogged even when it felt like no one was
listening, because I viewed it as part of my author training. Even if no one
EVER listened, I was a better, faster, cleaner, more disciplined writer and I
was investing in the long-term.

New Writers are Vulnerable

A boxer who’s been in the game for
ten years, has a wall of title belts, has already been through the fire and
gotten outside validation? It’s easier for that guy to jump in the ring.
There’s a psychological advantage this guy earned with blood, time and pain.

For the newbies? Everyone thinks
we’re nuts. They forget that even that title champ was a once a green pea
tripping over the jump rope, too.

Becoming a writer is easy. Staying a
writer is another matter entirely.

The beginning is a delicate time.
It’s easy to get discouraged, but remember this:

Every NYTBSA, every Pulitzer-winner,
every literary legend was once just an unpaid amateur with a dream, too.

Learn to keep going no matter what,
and you cannot imagine the edge you’ll have in this profession (ANY
profession).

Keep training. Keep blogging. Keep
writing books, even bad books. Keep reading. Keep studying. Learn from everyone
you can. It’s how we grow. How we learn. We can’t learn from the sidelines. We
need to get into the fray even when we know it’s going to hurt because that’s
what gives us staying power. And, as the great coach Vince Lombardi said,
Quitters never win and winners never quit;) .

Have you dealt with nasty people who
tried to undermine your dream? What activities do you use to train as a
writer-artist? What area do you need help? Where do you feel you’re weak?
What’s your plan for strengthening that area? What activities do you think
might help writers with endurance training?

Kristen Lamb

Read the entire article and many
other helpful blog posts by Kristen Lamb here

Friday, 22 March 2013

Our group’s seminars are becoming a
tradition that many local writers and readers look out for. Monday’s event,
partly sponsored by NZ Book Month, drew a good crowd from the Shore and beyond
to the Browns Bay RSA to hear Graeme Lay, Rae Roadley and Roger Hall talk about
their work.

Graeme Lay kicked off proceedings
with a spirited account of his historical publications and how he came to write
them. As with many authors, access to historic family documents and photos
provided inspiration for his first foray into biographical fiction with the
story of Alice and Luigi in 2006. He
has just published a novel about the life of Captain Cook, where he imagined
Cook’s inner life and his interactions with shipmates. The Secret Life of James Cook is currently at the printer and should
be on the shelves in a week or two.

Rae
Roadley is an author, journalist, writing tutor and columnist whose memoir, Love at the End of the Road, published
by Penguin, tells of her life after she fell in love with a farmer and swapped
city living for life in an historic villa on a Kaipara Harbour peninsula. She
has worked in public relations and has attended countless creative
writing courses. She explained how she came to write the book and described her
career as a rural writer.

Roger Hall was brave enough to share
with the audience four of his plays that failed to live up to the successes of
his other works. It became clear that the failures were generally due to
circumstances beyond his control – undeserved poor reviews, badly-directed
performances, and other bad luck events that can scupper any dramatic
production. As a theatre person I found myself wondering how to right these
injustices!

We may have a chance to help.
Maureen Green is going around local schools to promote books by our group’s
writers and is taking two of Roger Hall’s titles with her – The Three Little Pigs for the littlies, and
A Way of Life – his play about NZ
farming. We may yet be able to expunge those failures from the record!

Friday, 15 March 2013

On a recent holiday my husband re-read
Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life. Stopping now and then to talk to me about
various sections and phrases, he reminded me of details I had forgotten.Facey portrayed a moving story of a life of
poverty and hardship, of neglect and, at times, abject cruelty and of sheer
hard work.His book became a best
seller, but the Afterword by Jan Carter (author of Nothing to Spare: Recollections of Australian Pioneering Women) put
the story into perspective and resonated with me.

Carter likened Facey to John Bunyan, author
of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which in itself is a fascinating comparison.
Her reasoning was that both men were uneducated ‘with similarities in their
backgrounds and parallels in their writings.’ They wrote of life as it
happened, like a journey leading them forever on to whatever awaited them, they
wrote as they spoke, they introduced characters as they saw them – warts and
all – and whilst they had vastly differing religious beliefs they were both
keen observers with an understanding of the natural rhythms of speech making
them great story tellers. Neither sought nor expected recognition for their
stories yet both have achieved a level of fame that many authors can only dream
about.

Facey was in his eighties when he completed
the book and in 1981, its first year of publication, he was nominated as
Australian of the Year. His stories touched people who either remembered
similar events in their own or their families lives, or by people who came to
realise that the life of a child in the late 1800s and early 1900s was a
distinct contrast to anything our modern children would understand and expect.

What Carter pointed out was that Facey was
not famous, biographers and historians did not seek him out, he was simply an
ordinary man with an extraordinary story to tell. The fact that he called his
life fortunate is impressive and says a lot about the man. At the end of his life,
he saw his time in two parts. The first as a child and young man alone in the
world and struggling against the odds; the second part as husband to the woman
he loved dearly and a father to sons and daughters he sought to protect, still
struggling through hardship but no longer alone. His story is now seen as a social and
political history of Australia of the times.

At the same time, I was reading a novel –The Misremembered Man by Christina
McKenna. The chapters alternate between a funny, nearly farcical, lonely hearts
story of two forty-year-olds finding each other, and the portrayal of life in an
Irish orphanage with its horrific history of abuse and neglect. That part of
the book was based on fact and was difficult reading - just as difficult as some
of that in Facey’s book.

However, McKenna’s technique of weaving two
stories in one - the comical, modern (1970s) near romance with a twist with the
sad story of a boy in the orphanage - provided relief from the reality her words
painted. It wasn’t until well into the book that you realised the author was in
fact writing a social history of the times. Orphanages such as those did exist
for far longer than they should have. Look it up.

For me, as a social history writer, the
success of these books is inspirational. Whether they are autobiographies or
history lessons wrapped up in a novel, these stories of times past are
something that makes us think.It helps
us to understand the times we live in better, be thankful we have modern
information and can make decisions about
what happens in our country, in our community and in our small lives. It makes
our ordinary lives seem much more important.

Friday, 8 March 2013

I must confess right now, I am a beginner – not about sex,
but about writing about it. So I’m not intending to sound like an expert –
about sex, I mean, not writing about it, either.

I’ve written one and a half books before my present
enterprise; one about a virginal teenager, who, if he ever had any impure
thoughts, certainly didn’t disclose them to me as he floated in my head while we
worked our way through his imaginary spiritual crises. The other is about an
abused woman, so although there is some sex, it’s not the sort I want to write
about now.

Presently I am writing a love story, which for me means
there must be at least a little sex. I want to write about wonderful enriching
sex during which the participants shed all inhibitions and are filled with joy
and well being. But what a difficult thing it is to do. For a start, in my other books it is
apparent to everyone that I am neither a sixteen year old boy, or an abused
woman, and so no one will ever read those books and speculate on how much
of what I’ve written is based on personal experience. But if I write any steamy
scenes into my love story, everyone is going to look at me
speculatively; that is – if they don’t
ask outright if I’ve ever done those things. And what would I say to my mother
if she was still here? I know she knew I knew, but should I be writing things I
couldn’t show my mother?

Sex is just about the most important thing on the planet,
it’s the natural culmination of love (or lust) between any mating couple. Birds
and bees and animals and humans all do it and yet, it is the thing we stutter
and stammer and use euphemisms about more than anything else. My writing friends manage their sex scenes
with an amazing collection of obfuscations ranging from simply not
acknowledging anything took place except when the imminent arrival of a baby is
announced, to ‘he closed the door with a soft click’.

Writers write with elegance and grace about all manner of
things, with passion and dramatic effect about others, but it’s difficult to
even find alternatives to sexual language in the thesaurus on my computer.In the books I’ve read (for research purposes
only) male writers seem to write their sex scenes with blunt accuracy and
little finesse, and women write a great deal about the decor or the sunset and
not a lot else.I’ve even checked out
the 50 Shades phenomena(to be honest I
only got up to about six, couldn’t stand the heat).

So here I am, holding in one hand the thought that sex is
natural, wonderful and fun, and in the other the puritanical overlay that
inhibits writing freely. But I will do
it - it will create an intimacy my readers may not be at ease with, but I know
they know. There will be no reason to blush.

Friday, 1 March 2013

It’s March – New Zealand Book Month, and a chance to
celebrate the rich variety of titles appearing in and about this fair country.
I am increasingly delighted by the range of excellent books produced by our
independent publishers working without the safety net of mainstream companies. With
the advent of digital technology and international distribution channels, our
authors and indie publishers can access a worldwide market, selling their books
in print or as ebooks to anyone anywhere. The only barrier to fame and fortune
is discoverability, and this relies on READERS.

Yes, you, gentle reader, hold the power to raise an author
from obscurity to success.

When you find a book you enjoy, tell the world. Review,
retweet, recommend! Post a link on Facebook. Write it up on Goodreads. Add a
review on Amazon (no matter where you obtained the book) and it will slowly but
steadily push the author upwards into being discovered by other readers.

It won’t cost you anything but time, and it will help an
author you love to write more books for you to enjoy! Now that’s worth
investing in, isn’t it?

Our group’s contribution to NZ Book Month is a seminar on
March 18th, where three big names in NZ literature will be speaking
at Browns Bay RSA from 9.30am – 12.30. Graeme Lay will talk about his new novel
about the life of Captain Cook, Rae Roadley will speak about romance writing,
and Roger Hall will admit to his failures – ‘the ones that got away’.

Everyone welcome - come and see some of the excellent titles from independent publishers that will be on display.